diy-thermocam VS wokwi-verilog-gds-test

Agree. I think it depends on the use-case (and a personal interest in open-source and DIY stuff) which solution is the best.

For example with the open serial protocol of the DIY-Thermocam, you can build your own software applications in Python, Typescript, etc. to cover use-cases that are not part of any standalone solution (https://www.diy-thermocam.net/docs/serial/).

And if you are familiar with Arduino microcontrollers, you can change the firmware as you wish and extend it with new capabilities as well (https://github.com/maxritter/diy-thermocam/tree/master/firmw...).

What Tiny Tapeout is doing is amazing. Who would have thought that makers and students could have their own chip design made real for so little money?

The tools look amazing as well. You'll won't design the next Intel CPU on that 130nm process but to think that the Z80 will fit on 0.064 mm2 is just amazing.

It's great that there will still be an alternative to the official chip now that it won't be manufactured any more.

Now I want that gorgeous mauve ceramic package with a gold-plated cover over the chip...

https://twitter.com/l_vanek/status/1783557817133039738/photo...

https://tinytapeout.com/

https://tinytapeout.com/ now lest you purchase additional tiles for $50, each tile supports about 1k digital logic gates.

Next one closes June 1.

https://tinytapeout.com/faq/

You might enjoy this talk from the last Latchup on Wave Pipelining

https://fossi-foundation.org/latch-up/2024#riding-the-wave-b...

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall01/cs597a/w...

Tinytapeout 6 closes in a couple of weeks https://tinytapeout.com not too late to knock out your own chip.

The basic idea is that you buy a chunk of a die, your design's pins get multiplexed to the outside, you pay a bit extra and get a dev board

Chips take time - I taped out my 2 TinyTapeout CPU designs over a year ago, the board arrived a couple of months ago, TT3 is (as I understand) almost in the mail (I have a PDP8 there), and TT4 silicon has just come back (I have a RISCV subset there), TT5 is at the fab, and TT6 tapes out in 2 weeks.

Real silicon works like this, you start on a (big) design, do the creative stuff for a couple of months, for a year you test it to hell, by the time you tapeout you're done with it, then you start on the next design, about the time you're in the middle if doing the fun creative bit the old silicon comes back

The easiest way to try Skywater PDK is through TinyTapeout: https://tinytapeout.com/ -- highly recommended.

If you sign up for TinyTapeout [1], you can design a small digital circuit and have it manufactured on actual silicon for about a 100 dollars. It will be the same as your scenario, where everyone gets a tiny patch on the larger chip. You get the chip at the end.

[1] https://tinytapeout.com/ No affiliation, but participated in an earlier run.

Then move onto things like https://tinytapeout.com/ to get your first silicon fabricated.

That would be really neat, but I haven't seen anyone even make a CMOS imager on SKY130.

https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk

One could make an array of thermopiles, like the hacker that made their own imager out of discrete diodes (digiOBSCURA) . But each pixel would cost $7.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/excelitas-technol...

One might be able to make an array of thermistors (possibly with active cooling using a peltier) like the diycamera (digiOBSCURA) below. Might be an application of combining many RC oscillators in a tree and recovering the signal with an FFT. I have a gut feeling this is possible, but haven't show it.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/panasonic-electro...

https://github.com/IdleHandsProject/diycamera (digiOBSCURA)

One could experiment with microbolometers on tinytapeout. https://elicit.org/search?q=cmos+microbolometer

https://tinytapeout.com/